Soulwoven (20 page)

“Lit?”

The voice was louder this time, and closer.

The rapid play of the dream slowed and then stopped. Litnig stared into darkness so thick he felt that he could walk into it and be swallowed whole.

“Lit?
Quay?
Dil?
Ryse?
Len?”

The voice was Cole’s.

Something warm shifted beneath Litnig.
Something with dreadlocks.

Len.

Cole had handed the Aleani off to him so that they could run faster. He remembered struggling to balance the weight on his shoulders, remembered falling—

“Anybody?”

Litnig rolled off of Len onto sharp rocks. He had to put his left arm down for support.

Fiery pain scudded up the arm and exploded behind his eyes. His forearm bent and cracked underneath him. He hissed sharply and rolled onto his other side.

Broken
, he thought immediately. A cart had once crushed his big toe. The digit had swelled until it was the size of a cucumber, and he hadn’t been able to put weight on it for weeks.

The pain in his arm was much, much worse.

“Lit?” asked Cole again.

Litnig took in a deep breath to respond, and his lungs filled with dust. He coughed explosively. His ribs barked with pain.

“Yeah,” he croaked when the fit had passed.

Cole gave a relieved-sounding sigh. “I’m glad you’re alive,” he said.

Litnig heard rustling from Cole’s direction. There was a sharp
clack,
and a few sparks split the darkness. Cole coughed again and cursed fluently.

“Are you all right?” Litnig grunted.

Clack.
“All right enough. I landed on a little slope over—” Cole sighed. “Over there.”
Clack.
“Nine-tailed, effing torch!”

More coughing parted the gloom. A moment later, Quay’s voice asked, “Is everyone all right?”

Litnig tried to get his feet under him without moving his injured arm.

“No,” he mumbled.
“At least not Len and me.
And Ryse and Dil are still missing.”

Len’s breath hissed in and out slowly next to him. It sounded crackly, and dangerously shallow.

Cole’s torch finally sputtered to life to Litnig’s left. It took a second to catch fully, but eventually a warm orange glow spread over the rocks, and Litnig could see his brother.

The sight made him suck down another lungful of dust.

Cole’s face was covered in blood. His hair and eyebrows were matted in it. More was trickling down his forehead.

Another coughing fit racked Litnig’s body.

“Cole, your face—” he wheezed when he could.

Cole frowned and pressed his free hand against his head. “I know,” he said. “I’ll worry about it later.”

Litnig noticed a nick in the top of Cole’s ear as well, as though a chunk had been torn off. “Did you get hit by a rock or something?” he asked.

Cole cocked an eyebrow at him as if to say,
Ryse and Dil are missing, and
that’s
what you ask me?

Litnig shut his mouth and felt his cheeks burn.

Cole held the torch higher, and Litnig pushed himself up with his good arm to get a look around. Broken rocks and man-sized boulders surrounded him. A jagged black cliff stretched into the darkness above. The torchlight didn’t even reach the top of it.

Litnig stared upward.

We fell off that?

Quay was sitting stone-faced on the rocks between Litnig and Cole, methodically pressing the different parts of his body with his hands. Litnig couldn’t see Dil or Ryse, but the boulders around him were large enough that their bodies could’ve been hidden by them.

The light from the torch didn’t show him much of Len either, but Litnig looked down and thought he saw blood on the stones.

When he looked up again, Quay was standing over something in the rocks and mumbling softly. Cole was crouched over something else. Litnig sat and cradled his arm and let their voices wrap around him.

“—all right?”

“I think so, thank you—”

“—Dil?”

“I—”

Whimper. Sob.

Len showed no signs of recovery. Litnig scooted around on the rocks to face him. The movement put the torchlight at his back.

“Cole, can you bring the torch over here?” he asked.

“Dil needs it,” Cole said. Litnig heard rustling near his brother again. “Give me a second to light another one.”

Litnig grit his teeth and slid closer to Len. He found the Aleani’s thigh, then his shoulder, then his head. When he touched the back of Len’s skull, his hand came away wet and warm.

The light behind him brightened and moved closer, and Litnig got his first good look at Len’s body.

The Aleani lay facedown on the rocks. His dreadlocks and neck were wet with blood. A long laceration on his skull formed the epicenter of a shining purple bruise. His arms were trembling slightly.

Quay stepped around Litnig and knelt at Len’s side, a torch in his hand.

“We’ll need Ryse,” Litnig said.

“When she’s done with herself and the others,” the prince replied.

Quay looked calm and sober. He ran his hands over Len the same way he’d run them over himself.

Litnig’s stomach twisted. First Cole, then Quay—and Len— “Dammit, look at him!”

“Look at yourself.” Quay’s hands came away from Len’s left side with blood on them, and the prince wiped them on the Aleani’s trousers before continuing his examination.

Litnig looked at his injured arm. His skin was a nasty shade of red and yellow, and he thought he could see a bump partway down his forearm. He touched the side of his face, and his hand came away with partially congealed blood on it.

He swallowed his reply.

“Len goes last,” Quay said. He continued to run his hands over the Aleani. “Now help me. It will save us time if we can show Ryse where he’s hurt.”

Cole murmured to Dil by the other torch. Ryse worked her way unsteadily toward them over the rocks. Quay continued to prod at Len.

And Litnig squatted and did as he was told.

By the time they were finished, Litnig had helped Quay bandage a deep gash in Len’s side and put a wickedly twisted ankle into a better position. His hands were sweaty. His broken arm was killing him. And Quay was moving calmly and emotionlessly, not even breathing hard.

If it was me—
Litnig thought. He stared at Len’s prone body.
He’d leave me for last too, in a heartbeat.

Ryse joined him at Len’s side. Her eyes glowed with soulweaving. Her robe was torn near the shoulder. She looked a little wobbly.

Somewhere in the distance, he heard the sound of rocks tumbling.

“How are the others?” Quay asked. The prince was squatting near Len’s head and watching the Aleani breathe.

Ryse frowned and bent over Len. “They’ll be all right,” she said. “Dil’s more scared than hurt. And Cole’s head has stopped bleeding.”

Quay nodded. “Take a look at Litnig, please.”

Litnig stared at the blood oozing from the back of Len’s head. “It’s just a broken arm,” he said. “It can wait.”

Ryse reached for his left arm.

He twisted away from her. The movement sent pain sliding on whispers of grinding bone into his shoulder and neck.

Ryse gave him a white, glowing glare.

But she turned to Len nonetheless.

She shuffled around the Aleani, murmuring to herself and pressing her hands on his body. Sweat broke out on her forehead and her arms. At one point, she had to stop to catch her breath.

But small areas of Len’s body glowed white and then faded to normal, and he seemed to improve. He stopped trembling. The laceration on his head closed and healed.

After about ten minutes, Ryse sat down and sighed.

“That’s all I can do with him for now,” she said. The Aleani was still unconscious, and his skin burned to Litnig’s touch. “If I pull any more of his strength, it’ll exhaust him, and I’ve got nothing left to give.”

Quay stood. The prince had watched the proceedings silently.

“Thank you,” he said.
“Now Litnig.”

Litnig held his arm gingerly while Ryse crawled over to him. He’d snuck another look at it while she’d worked on Len—the lump on his forearm was growing. The bone had broken badly.

Ryse laid her hands on his arm. She turned the limb over gently in the torchlight, prodded the bump lightly, frowned when her touch made him recoil.

Litnig focused on breathing. He tried not to think about the pain, or the blood on his trousers, or the way his brother’s face had looked when the torch had caught fire.

It wasn’t easy.

Gently, Ryse took hold of his wrist with one hand and his upper arm with the other.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but this is going to hurt.”

Shadows shimmied in the torchlight. The distant thunder of shifting rocks echoed down the tunnel from above. The broken ends of Litnig’s bones ground against each other as she put pressure on them.

“Are you ready?”

He took a deep breath and nodded.

Ryse straightened out his arm. His forearm crackled with a thousand tongues of fire. His bones grated over one another and slid into place. A sound that was somewhere between a whimper, a grunt, and a scream came out of his mouth without his permission.

But the pain lessened significantly after that.

When he trusted himself to speak again, he panted, “Can you heal it?”

Ryse looked at his arm again. Her eyes still reflected the River of Souls.

She let go of him and shook her head.

“Your draw in the River is too weak to help me, Lit,” she said. She sat back on the stones and ran a hand across her forehead. “And I’m too damn tired to heal you on my own.” She shook her head and muttered, “Useless.”

Litnig’s mouth went dry.

Useless.

When he’d tried to follow Ryse into the Academy as a child, a gray-robed soulweaver had evaluated him. It had taken just a few seconds.

His affinity to the River is too weak,
the man had said.
He would be useless.

Litnig shut his eyes and tried to let the word slide off his battered shoulders. He could still help, somehow. He could—

Ryse’s hand closed over his good arm. “I can get to it once I’ve had a chance to rest,
Lit
. Just give me some time.” She smiled at him.

He was even more grateful for the smile than for the promise behind it.

Ryse took a shirt from the pack behind her and began to fashion a sling around his arm. It was makeshift, but just having the cloth around the injury made Litnig feel a little better.

“What next?” Ryse asked Quay.

The prince dusted off his trousers and stood. “We move.
Now.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the broken stones. Litnig flinched as Ryse tightened his sling. He watched Cole and Dil stop taking inventory of one of the party’s remaining packs and stare at Quay.

Ryse frowned.

“My prince, Len will take a little while to recover enough—”

“The soulweaver behind us was robed in black.”

The prince paused. Litnig’s heart sank.

Quay stood over Len and stared down the passage ahead. “We need to find a way out,” he said. “We can’t wait for Len.”

Nobody argued, but Litnig caught his brother scowling and saw tightness in Ryse’s jaw.

“Then who’s going to carry him?” Litnig asked. He flexed his fist experimentally in its sling.

“No one.”
The prince’s voice was as cold as the stones below him. “We leave him behind.”

The torches flickered. Len breathed laboriously on the rocks below.

“You can’t be serious,” Litnig said.

But Quay was. Litnig could see it in the angle of his eyebrows and the way his skin was stretched over his skull.

“He’s still alive! We can’t just—”

Quay looked down his nose at him, and Litnig felt small and stupid and unimportant and worthless, just like he had in Nutharion City.

“He will be a great burden on the rest of us if we try to bring him along,” the prince said. “And we will probably lose him even if we do.” Quay glanced at Ryse, as if for confirmation.

She turned away.

“At the height of your strength, Litnig,” Quay continued, “
maybe
you could have carried him out. But right now none of us is strong enough to even try.”

Litnig’s mouth worked silently.
Useless.
His head was beginning to ache.

“I—”

“We can drag him.”

All eyes turned to Dil. She was leaning on Cole, who had his arm around her shoulders and was watching Quay like a dog eyes a man coming toward her puppies with a sack.

Dil’s face was pale, and she winced when she spoke, but her voice was strong.

“When we take down big prey in Lurathen, we tie three branches in a triangle and strap the kill onto it.” She drew a diagram in the air with her finger as she spoke. “You thread a loop through the top of the triangle and slip it around your waist, and then you drag it. We call it a deadcarry.”

She looked down at Len and bit her lip. “We could use Quay’s scabbards and my bow to make a frame, and a blanket and some strips from Len’s clothing to finish it. But it’d be a rough ride—and someone would still have to drag it.”

Quay frowned.

“I can drag the weight,” Litnig rasped.

He struggled to his feet. His arm ached. His legs felt like jelly. His head thumped and thundered.

Useless.

A moment passed. Quay looked at him emotionlessly.

But eventually, the prince nodded.

TWENTY-TWO

Litnig shifted from foot to foot as Dil worked around him. She collected their belts and used scraps of clothing to fashion a loop for his waist, then a makeshift harness that would help distribute the weight of the deadcarry over his shoulders and chest. She worked in a desperate, feverish crouch, her hands flying over leather and cloth, tying and untying and retying in the dim light. Cole watched balefully. Quay didn’t move. Ryse reclined on one of the packs and closed her eyes. Her face still gleamed with sweat.

Litnig wondered if Dil wasn’t throwing herself into the task so hard to avoid thinking about what had happened above, or what lay ahead.